Energy Efficiency and Optimal Power Allocation in Virtual-MIMO Systems

This paper investigates energy efficiency (EE) performance of a virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless system using the receiver-side cooperation with the compress-and-forward protocol. We derive a linear approximation of EE as a function of spectral efficiency (SE) in the low SE operation regime. In addition, we obtain a closed-form lower bound for EE which is valid for both low and high SE regions. This lower bound can be used for optimizing the power allocation between the transmitter and the relay in order to minimize the overall energy per bit consumption in the system. Both analytical and simulation results demonstrate that the virtual MIMO system using the receiver-side cooperation outperforms the multiple-input single-output (MISO) case in terms of energy efficiency. Finally we show that, with the optimal power allocation, the virtual-MIMO system achieves an EE performance close to that of an ideal MIMO system.